Season 3 is interesting, though running at a diminished population right now since the season is due to reset in August at some point. Plus the PTR is running for the next patch, which brings a whole slew of really interesting changes to the game. No more trial keys, no more rift keys, the whole thing with Kanai's cube which is a game-changer in its own right, class balances, new items and sets, new zone, bounty changes, no more zDPS crap (mostly), monster affix changes, monster XP and health changes...

Holy crap that cube stuff is pretty crazy. No more needing to wear both focus and restraint. Or wear them both but still use the RRoG ability. That's pretty crazy strong, let alone also being able to use an armor and weapon ability too. Serpent Sparker + Furnace (or other high DPS) weapon. Tasker and Theo + some better DPS gloves. Lots of possibilities here.

Yeah it's definitely changing the game, though it doesn't work with set bonuses so Focus and Restraint would still need to be used together to get the bonus. But you could definitely use RRoG in the cube and get that bonus.

The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Obby wrote:Yeah it's definitely changing the game, though it doesn't work with set bonuses so Focus and Restraint would still need to be used together to get the bonus. But you could definitely use RRoG in the cube and get that bonus.

But you still have a tough choice with the elemental cycling ring out there as well. Depending on RORG still essentially means giving up on focus and restraint for solo play with unity.

I am more excited about the weapon slot. There are a lot of good weapon and armor mods. There are a lot of slots tied up in sets that cover up interesting unique mods. DH can run essentially what equates to another awareness breaking down a crappy chest piece or some nice frozen immunity from ice climbers. Calamity and balefire isn't a choice anymore, you just run balefire and mod in calamity

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Anybody still grinding? 2.4 is out and I'm trying to get my monk up to speed. Ancient versions of everything and decent level gems in every spot is a hell of a grind. I'm now going to be mad if they alter the set balances such that the pieces I'm spending so much time to build are inherently inferior.

Title: It was given by the XKCD moderators to me because they didn't care what I thought (I made some rantings, etc). I care what YOU think, the joke is forums.xkcd doesn't care what I think.

I am playing Season casually with Crusader. I started out with the free Invoker set. Didn't like it too much because it is terrible against mobs, but the set opens the way to T10 rift farming quickly and allows you to get half a dozen legendaries per run. The developers did quite a lot of work to make the grind less frustrating. For example, the key wardens are now marked with a purple arrow on the map. By paragon 350, I have gears to run LoN (the ring set that gives bonus for every piece of ancient gears you equip) with Bombardment and reach GR 60+. The nearly permanent horse is pretty awesome.

Yeah, I feel like I should grind my wizard to at least get the set, but meh. Can probably find it normally anyways, especially now that I got my demon hunter up to being able to be helpful in t10. Thank god I'm off that sentry build. But I dunno, I only tend to play when I want to just slaughter some stuff and not think.

T10 sentry build works fine now though with the buffed quiver and the other piece they gave (manticore 2h crossbow). DH isn't great for grifts anyway at the moment so sentry's as relevant as it's ever been.

Title: It was given by the XKCD moderators to me because they didn't care what I thought (I made some rantings, etc). I care what YOU think, the joke is forums.xkcd doesn't care what I think.

There's currently an event during january of 2017. Basically there's a dungeon with sixteen levels, that recreates the world of the first Diablo. The graphics are pixelated, the interface in retro-style and most sounds are borrowed from the first and second installments. It's great fun! Anyway, it's about two hours long, longer for achievment hunters, so I think it's worth to boot up D3 again and play.

Also, for anyone who hasn't played in a while, they're continuing their trend of throwing gear at you:Vanilla: Legendaries are bad and hard to getEarly RoS: Legendaries are good, but hard to find.Current: Legendaries are even better, and they show up everywhere. It's like they put Oprah in charge of legendary drop rates.

If you haven't played in a while, it's a good time to come back for a bit. With somewhat reliable access to all the legendaries, there are tons of build options that weren't attainable previously. The game is still more of the same (click a bit to kill things, click a bit to collect loot, repeat), but if you enjoyed it for a while and lost interest, it'll be a nice diversion for a week or two.

They will release a DLC introducing the necromancer class sometime soon(ish). It's not clear how much it will cost and how much content it will have apart from the class itself, but I doubt they'll go for the same numerical values as Reaper of Souls. I guess that will be a test run of how willing people are to throw more money in the form of DLC at D3. Blizzard does have quite a variety of monetization across their IP, so I'm not quite on the "D3 is doomed, micropayments ruin everything" bandwagon yet.

I got sucked into season 9 for the stash slot and because some friends started playing. The Balance between the classes is pretty good for single player now (if you pick the same build as everybody else) but the group play is still bizzare (favoring certain classes and extreme builds like zdps) and many of the single player builds rely heavily on being by yourself (so you can use unity to split your damage with your henchmen).

While you can help people with some things in general that just means the weaker follows the strong around doing nothing. Co-operative play is so poorly understood by the community it really limits diablo's endgame to a well co-ordinated few.

Your buddy wants you to play diablo 3 so he can carry you around maps like a puppy dog and make his uber-character feel useful. Maybe making your own uber-character (perhaps better than his?) will motivate you to keep going but I just wish diablo could deliver more on the co-operative experience.

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Diablo 3's balance has always been horribly on the side of offense. Damage mitigation via killing the enemy is the most common tactic. Through most of the "game" now (which I would call after having a 6-piece set), you're fighting enemies that can mostly kill you in 2 shots, the weakest enemies maybe 4. Your healing is on the order of every second. There is no meaningful way to increase toughness significantly while offense is an endless scale. The higher you go, the larger the ratio between hits you give to kill something and hits you take to die.

Title: It was given by the XKCD moderators to me because they didn't care what I thought (I made some rantings, etc). I care what YOU think, the joke is forums.xkcd doesn't care what I think.

My Firebirds Wizard mostly stood in the largest group of enemies it could find because of a couple pieces of gear that made a huge durability difference. I have a second wizard for normal rifts/bounties that abuses the interaction between Boon of the Hoarder, Avarice Band, and Goldwrap in order to get effectively infinite toughness. I'm certainly not in the most difficult content, but I can do rank 70-75 grifts and survive a lot of abuse, or I can do T10 normal rifts and bounties with a speed build that takes no damage.

No, it's really not like that because of the entire greater rift concept. The Highest rift you can do in 15 minutes is mostly based on offense, not defense. Defense is done through physical movement and stuns moreso than actually taking hits. You can easily make a build that will stand in a pile of T10 damage and shrug it off basically infinitely but it will also do enough damage to push way higher than GR45 that corresponds to. Put that same build in GR70 and it's still got plenty of damage but no longer the toughness to play the game the same way. They playstyle changes. Toughness deficiencies are compensated by twitchy play, grouping of monsters, paying attention to incoming projectiles, etc. Playing GR80 on any build is not about a character sheet that was the same ratio's as when you played GR45 with more damage and toughness accordingly, it's about scaling up only the damage and moving around the screen more carefully.

If you have 13 legendaries of your choice (3 more in your cube, 3 legendary gems at 25), your defense is pretty much established. Sure you can get some anchients which will offer some more vit but your build's toughness is actually pretty fixed. Lets say 50% gains at most and I really think that's being generous. Your damage though can go probably at least 4 times higher between a crappy roll of all 16 slots and perfect ancients, paragon levels, caldesan's despairs, legendary gem levels past 25, and that's probably being conservative. The ratio of improvement is therefor about 8 to 1 in favor of offense once you've actually equipped the pieces you intend to use.

Title: It was given by the XKCD moderators to me because they didn't care what I thought (I made some rantings, etc). I care what YOU think, the joke is forums.xkcd doesn't care what I think.

I was responding to your claim that there's no real way to increase toughness but offense is an endless scale, which is not really true. In fact, once your gear is set, your effective damage gains are less than your effective toughness gains.

Once your gear is set, your offensive and defensive gains both come from Paragon levels. For Wizards, for example, each paragon level is worth 5 points of int, which is also .5 resist all. With over 12k Int on my Wizard, that means I get a bonus 1200 resist all as a side perk. As such, I don't gear for resistance - focusing on armor or health give better survivability returns, or I can focus on offensive stats instead.

Due to the nature of how D3 does its scaling, increasing int by 10% produces a 10% increase in damage. Likewise, increasing resistance by 10% gives a 10% increase in survivability. That means that (by not having any resistance from non-int sources), I get the same amount of toughness and damage from each paragon level.

One last wrinkle in this is that monster damage and monster health don't scale at the same rate as we go up in Grifts. Each grift level boosts monster HP by 17%, but only boosts monster damage by 7.16%. Going up 4.5 Grifts doubles the amount of damage you need to do, but is only a 35% increase in the amount of damage coming in.

When you get to the point where your upgrades are all based off of increases to your main stat, Any gains you make will boost your effective toughness more than they'll boost your effective damage.

you're neglecting gem levels. Bane of the Trapped specifically (which is almost ubiquitous), and also Bane of the Stricken. raising their level raises damage. It's on a slight decay curve but not meaningfully weaker per level than it is at 25. They add no toughness and increase damage more than additional primary attribute. Other damage gems work similarly.

All resistance is also on a decay curve of effectiveness. The toughness % bonus from a point of all resistance goes down the more you have.

Title: It was given by the XKCD moderators to me because they didn't care what I thought (I made some rantings, etc). I care what YOU think, the joke is forums.xkcd doesn't care what I think.

Main stat based damage gains face exactly the same diminishing returns that Resist based toughness gains face (it's the same formula with different coefficients). As for gems, they do indeed increase damage without increasing survivability, but their rank is limited by the rank of grift you can clear. Each rank on BotT is a .3% increase in damage (additive, so there are diminishing returns), but requires you to clear an additional rank of GRift (a 17% increase in mob health). Since you have to be able to do 17% more damage to get that 0.3% increase, the majority of your damage increase has to come from somewhere else (i.e. main stat increases). BotS is a different beast, but even if you call it a 5% damage increase per rank, it can't keep up with mob health.

The math still works out that by the time you've managed to increase your damage by X% (via main stats and gems), you've increased your toughness by at least .9X% (main stat->resist/armor conversion, but no gem boost). To make use of this damage, you go to whatever rank GRift has mobs with X% more health, and their damage is increased by .35X%. The amount of time it takes you to kill them stays the same, but the amount of time it takes them to kill you goes up.

I just talked right past you apparently. You do not make up the monster health increase from a greater rift level increase with your primary attribute, you make up for it mostly with Gem levels. They provide NOT ALL of the level's increase (or else they would scale infinitely) but a good fraction of it. A larger fraction than say... increasing the caldesan's despiar bonus of every piece of gear you have by 1 level (65 total primary attribute points). You DON'T scale infinitely with damage and you eventually limit on how high a rift you can go because gear can only roll so perfect and the increase you need in paragon levels per grift improvement (gems + 65 attribute points from caldesains) required grows exponentially.

So, BotT goes from a 37.5% damage increase at rank 75 to 37.8% at rank 76. That's a 0.21% increase in damage. BotS is a 0.64% increase in damage. They stack multiplicatively, but at these values that barely affects things (total boost from both gems: 0.86% damage increase). That does not do a whole lot against the 17% health increase per GRift.

If my math is wrong, please show me where. If my math is correct, then you should probably try more condescending statements that you don't back up with numbers. Those will probably work.

I just started playing for the first time since season 6 - decided to run Thornsader, since I haven't played crusader yet. It's a ton of fun, although the game seems to be easier overall than when I last played.